This website uses tracking cookies and also third-party tracking cookies in order to send you targeted advertising and online services in line with your preferences. If you would like to know more or to disallow all or some cookies, click here. If you continue to navigate on this website you implicitly consent to the use of cookies.

About Moleskinerie

Moleskinerie Archive

Recent Posts

Moleskinerie is the official blog of Moleskine® and it is completely dedicated to you. It tells about your passions, youradventures, your experiences. Everythinag that involves your ideas and the way you express them on your notebooks.

Featured Artist: Cully

07/04/2006

"Sketching as an activity has come and gone from my life several timesover the years. It seems when I am busiest, and most productive in myprofessional art life, my sketching and private art also expands. (Orperhaps it’s the other way around.) The last time I had a serioussketch habit was in art school, as an undergraduate. I studiedillustration there, but it was the figure drawing classes that reallygot my creative juices flowing. I graduated from the School of VisualArts a few years ago, but soon found my focus switching fromillustration to theatre. I went back to school to get a masters degreein theatrical design, but I no longer had much of a reason to draw thehuman figure. Most of my art then and since has focused on architectureand scenery. I missed figure drawing. I missed the challenge of tryingto capture a model. Her gesture, her expression, her personality. Aftera while I really felt that I was lacking something important in mywork.

The old masters tell you that figure drawing is the basis foreverything that an artist does, and that all art is contained there. Istarted looking for opportunities to draw people again. It didn’t takeme long to realize that the subways offered me a perfect opportunity. Ispend an average of an hour a day on the train, and there’s always aninteresting face close at hand. I started carrying a sketchbook andtrying to capture a little bit of something. It was actually a month ormore before I was brave enough to pull the book out of my bag. Veryquickly a few things established themselves: I didn’t like sketching inpencil on the train, and I needed a smaller book that was lessobtrusive. After some trial and error that led me to my current comboof a ballpoint pen, and a 3×5 Moleskine. It took me a little while toadjust to the rocking of the train, and to learn how to pick a modelthat wasn’t getting off in one or two more stops. Now I do an averageof 3 to 5 drawings a week on the train and I’m close to filling mythird Moleskine with subway sketches. It’s been the perfect complimentto my professional work and has helped me relearn some of my drawingbasics.

"Each of us has a private world, and the only difference between the
reader and the writer is that the writer has the ability to describe and
dramatize that private world. As a writer, I write to see. If I knew how it
would end, I wouldn’t write. It’s a process of discovery."

– John McGahern…Kudos to Arnault, Carlos and the rest of the WorkingUnit crew for the successful "My Moleskine" exhibition in Kansai, Japan.

Have a nice weekend everyone. Get out, have a life – and write about it! Be back on Monday.